Camera Man: Dana Stevens on the Life and Times of Buster Keaton | Features

Keaton came of age as the movies were just getting started. While some of his contemporaries transplanted their stage personas to the screen, Stevens shows us how Keaton jettisoned his over time, literally piece by piece in giving up the props that were part of his vaudeville routines. But he held on to the themes of a man struggling with the failures of the material world. His most famous moments involved gigantic props that could not fit on a stage like the house that literally falls on him in “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” (which lives on today as a popular gif) and the title train in “The General.” “For Keaton, every potential home is a space of danger and transformation; no façade stays standing for long … Not only buildings but cars, trains, boats, whole railway bridges show themselves to be as flimsy as theatrical scenery.” How much this must have resonated with a man whose home was wherever his family was performing, and much the audiences were reassured by laughter in an era when the unprecedented transformation of the mechanical and material world had to be equally exciting and scary. Perhaps Keaton’s imaginative use of the camera and effects stemmed from his life as a performer, looking props like a table and a basketball to dream up ways they could be put to the most entertaining use.

Stevens gives us telling details—how a forgotten short film from the Ford Motor Company(!) was the almost-certain inspiration for Keaton’s second-made, first-released film as a director, “Home Made,” and the context—how the careers of Mabel Normand and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle intersected and paralleled Keaton’s. (She also makes it clear that Arbuckle’s cancellation following allegations of rape was never supported by the facts determined at legal proceedings.) Time telescoped before me as I read that Joseph Schenck, who was Keaton’s brother-in-law and producer in the ’20s, was the same man who gave Marilyn Monroe her start in the ’50s. 

She touches on issues of race and gender that foreshadowed central cultural, political, and legal conflicts that persist today, with evocative descriptions of major figures like Normand, Bert Williams, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, important here as counterpoint rather than intersection. She describes the shifting power centers in the entertainment industry as artists creating what interested them ceded control to (white male) money people who created what would sell and the ancillary enterprises that grew up around the movies, especially the nascent precursors to today’s extensive coverage of media and celebrity (including this site).